H. G. Wells Quotes

307 Sourced Quotes

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe... Yet, clumsily or smoothly, the world, it seems, progresses and will progress.

H. G. Wells
One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.

H. G. Wells
But man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of Nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.

H. G. Wells
Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature's inexorable imperative.

H. G. Wells
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. It is the peculiar snare of the perplexed orthodox, and soon Mr. Brumley was in a state of nearly unendurable moral indignation with Sir Isaac for a hundred exaggerations of what he was and of what conceivably he might have done to his silent yet manifestly unsuitably married wife.

H. G. Wells
Kipps was unprepared for the unpleasant truth; that the path of social advancement is and must be strewn with broken friendships.

H. G. Wells
To ride a bicycle properly is very like a love affair-chiefly it is a matter of faith. Believe you do it, and the thing is done; doubt, and, for the life of you, you cannot.

H. G. Wells
Alone— it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.

H. G. Wells
An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.

H. G. Wells
Oswald Cabal: Dragging out life to the last possible second is not living to the best effect. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat. The best of life, Passworthy, lies nearest to the edge of death.

H. G. Wells
The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

H. G. Wells
A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked.

H. G. Wells
"Pull yourself together," said the Voice, "for you have to do the job I've chosen for you." Mr. Marvel blew out his cheeks, and his eyes were round. "I've chosen you," said the Voice. "You are the only man except some of those fools down there, who knows there is such a thing as an invisible man. You have to be my helper. Help me—and I will do great things for you. An invisible man is a man of power."

H. G. Wells
I was too restless to watch long; I am too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours—that is another matter.

H. G. Wells
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

H. G. Wells
Every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it.

H. G. Wells
The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf. It's almost a law.

H. G. Wells
That is the only way I ever heard of true research going. I asked a question, devised some method of obtaining an answer, and got — a fresh question. Was this possible or that possible? You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator, what an intellectual passion grows upon him! You cannot imagine the strange, colourless delight of these intellectual desires!

H. G. Wells
If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure.

H. G. Wells
He had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry.

H. G. Wells
And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of men.

H. G. Wells
It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments, traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms of behaviour, and that these awaking intelligent people must constitute first a protest and then a creative resistance to the inertia that was stifling and threatening us. These people I imagined would say first, "We are drifting; we are doing nothing worth while with our lives. Our lives are dull and stupid and not good enough."

H. G. Wells
The army ages men sooner than the law and philosophy; it exposes them more freely to germs, which undermine and destroy, and it shelters them more completely from thought, which stimulates and preserves.

H. G. Wells
I don't think you fully appreciate the importance of Illusion in life, the Essential Nature of Lies and Deception of the body politic.

H. G. Wells
Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination.

H. G. Wells
And all this time the lunar plants were growing around us, higher and denser and more entangled, every moment thicker and taller, spiked plants, green cactus masses, fungi, fleshy and lichenous things, strangest radiate and sinuous shapes.

H. G. Wells
It is usual to assume that the sun will go on cooling steadily in the future. But people... forget that the planets must ultimately fall back one by one into the parent body. As these catastrophes occur, the sun will blaze with renewed energy.

H. G. Wells
For the true scientific method is this: To trust no statements without verification, to test all things as rigorously as possible, to keep no secrets, to attempt no monopolies, to give out one's best modestly and plainly, serving no other end but knowledge.

H. G. Wells
Anthropology has been compared to a great region, marked out indeed as within the sphere of influence of science, but unsettled and for the most part unsubdued. Like all such hinterland sciences, it is a happy hunting-ground for adventurers.

H. G. Wells
Meteorology constantly and persistently aims at prophecy, and it will never stand in a place of honor until it can certainly foretell.

H. G. Wells